Toward Sound Localization Testing in Virtual Reality to Aid in the Screening of Auditory Processing Disorders.
Melissa Ramírez, Johannes M Arend, Petra von Gablenz and 2 others
PMID 38425297WHAT IT FOUND
Virtual reality sound localization testing is feasible but less accurate than loudspeakers.
Headphone-based audio increased errors by about 4 degrees compared to the baseline. Virtual visuals did not worsen performance. These results offer preliminary cutoffs for normal-hearing adults only.
Key findings
01Sound localization errors were higher in virtual reality (11.94 degrees) and augmented reality (13.16 degrees) compared to the loudspeaker baseline (7.99 degrees).
02Switching from real to virtual visual feedback did not significantly change localization accuracy compared to the augmented reality condition.
03The study provides preliminary cutoff values for normal hearing adults in VR, but explicitly states these cannot be applied to children.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was very small (19 participants) and consisted only of normal-hearing adults, so the results do not apply to people with hearing loss, APD, or children. The study was a feasibility test, not a diagnostic validation. The authors explicitly state they did not establish normative data. Localization accuracy was lower in VR than in the standard loudspeaker setup, which could affect the sensitivity of screening. The correlation between performance in the real and virtual conditions was weak and non-significant, likely because the normal-hearing participants had little variance in their scores.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German Research Foundation.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the cutoff values reported here (e.g., 26.83 degrees) to screen patients for auditory processing disorders. These numbers come from 19 normal-hearing adults and are explicitly described by the authors as preliminary proxies, not normative data. The authors also state that these results cannot be applied to children.